


Witness

by ysande



Category: Daredevil (TV)
Genre: College era, Friendship, Gen, Hurt/Comfort, Whump
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2019-03-11
Updated: 2019-03-11
Packaged: 2019-11-15 14:07:01
Rating: Teen And Up Audiences
Warnings: Creator Chose Not To Use Archive Warnings
Chapters: 1
Words: 3,547
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/18074840
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/ysande/pseuds/ysande
Summary: For whumpdeedoo for the WhumpExchange, whose prompt was: 'Team receives videos/information of A being tortured’Foggy overhears something his new roommate would never have wanted to share.





	Witness

Matt Murdock is ninety three per cent perfectly pleasant, and seven per cent all kinds of weird. Those are exact figures. Foggy's been keeping track.

His new roommate is nice. He really is. He's polite. He's considerate. He talks easily and laughs freely. He's _pleasant_. Matt never eats the last of the chocolate (never eats the last of anything). He uses headphones when he's listening to music (uses headphones almost all the time, actually). He keeps his half of the room neat (keeps it close to empty). Half the student population would kill for a roomie like Matt. 

But that seven per cent. Foggy has no idea what to make of that other, really-not-normal-ok, seven per cent. For example. Foggy will often come home to find Matt sitting in a dark room, with no heat on. Even though it's the fall semester. Even though it's barely forty degrees outside.

'I'm blind, Foggy,' Matt says with amusement every time Foggy bitches about it. 'It doesn't help when I turn the light on.'

'Yeah, well, what about heating?' Foggy shakes his head. 'I'm shaking my head at you, by the way. Or are you going to tell me that being blind makes you immune from being cold?' Foggy shivers and cranks on the heater. 'It's colder in here than it is outside, did you know that? That's quite an achievement.'

Matt shrugs, a bit sheepishly. 'Sorry. I guess I didn't really think about the temperature. I'll remember for next time.'

And he does. From then on, Foggy returns to light and warmth, and it's glorious. And _normal_. Except - and Foggy could be wrong about this - except he has the nagging feeling that Matt's committed his schedule to memory, or something, and turns everything on when Foggy is due back from class or whatever. Because the few times that Foggy's popped back unexpectedly, or bailed early from a night out, he'll hear Matt scramble to turn on the light, and the room will be an ice box even though the heater's switch has been flicked on. Which means that, normally, Matt sits in the cold and the dark _voluntarily_.

What can Foggy say to that? 'Dude, can you please quit being considerate about the lights and heating for my sake, and just have it on when it's cold and dark _even if I'm not in the room?_ ' Even in his head that sounds ridiculous. There's nothing Foggy can do but chalk it up to that extremely weird seven per cent.

And the guy doesn't like ice cream. Straight up nearly had a panic attack the one time Foggy had bought him a cone - the least he could do, since Matt had bought the beers, but instead of the happy smile that Foggy had been expecting (okay - anticipating), Matt had frozen and stammered and all but bolted home. Foggy thinks that maybe Matt's (really, really) lactose intolerant or something, but no, Matt will cheerfully drink lattes and eat cereal, so it seems it's only particularly delicious forms of dairy that he objects to. 

Foggy's sure he's got it all figured out now, though. Matt's an honest-to-god, serious, card-carrying masochist. If he checks under Matt's mattress, he'll probably find some nipple clamps and a whip. (And now that he's had that thought, he will never, _ever_ check under Matt's mattress. Not that he was ever going to.)

But that odd mix of ninety three and seven; pleasant and awkward; thoughtful and utterly thoughtless (when it comes to himself) makes it hard for Foggy to know what to do sometimes. Like if it's Saturday night (ok, early Sunday morning) and he hasn't seen hair nor hide of Matt since Friday lunch time. Is that because Matt's busy? Studying? Scoring? Or is he lost in a basement carpark? Trapped in a stairwell like that old guy Foggy read about in the news, found weeks later as a decomposing body?

Matt does have a cell phone, an old brick of a thing with a physical keypad that he can thumb to enter a number, or bash out a text message surprisingly quickly. But Foggy knows he doesn't tend to check his own text messages, because his cell phone isn't advanced enough to read it out loud to him, and he hates the idea of having to ask a sighted person to do it. So the usual, discreet way of checking on a missing roomie is out. And the other obvious method - just calling him - seems so awkwardly callous that even Foggy cringes. What's he meant to say when Matt picks up? 'Uh, hey. I was just noticing your absence. Welp. You're clearly alive. Continue being absent, my lucky friend.'

So Foggy very deliberately acknowledges the absence, and puts it out of his mind, the way his meditation class taught him to do. He absolutely does not worry about his grown roomie who, despite being blind, is also exceedingly capable (most of the time) and light years smarter than Foggy. More popular with the ladies, too, that corner of his brain that he _hates_ pipes up, and Foggy grumbles to himself and acknowledges that too, and puts it out of his mind. It's one forty in the morning, and without a party to be at or an exam to cram for, it's too late for anything to be in his mind.

He falls asleep on top of the covers of his bed, head towards the room's door instead of on his pillow, with his phone in his hand.

That's why when the phone rings - very loudly and very shrilly - Foggy flails violently awake, disoriented and confused. 

'Wh'st?' Foggy grunts blearily, before his brain turns over enough to realise he needs to answer the phone before speaking into it. He mashes at the screen until he can see the caller ID - Matt! - and swipes to answer the call. 'Wh'sit?' he manages, slightly more articulately this time, but he's not winning any essay prizes for that.

Foggy's sluggish brain ticks over at the speed of sludge, so it takes him a good twenty seconds before he registers the silence on the other end as a pocket dial.

Foggy groans to himself. If he has to listen to Matt make out with a girl because Matt can't be more careful with his phone, he's gonna rearrange Matt's socks into un-matching pairs, or something. And at first, Foggy's afraid that he will have to go through the awkwardness of rifling through his roomie's underwear drawer, because faintly in the distance on the other end of the line, he can hear heavy breathing. Foggy is about two inches away from hanging up when he hears a muffled thump and a choked grunt.

Suddenly, Foggy's wide awake. Some instinct keeps him quiet, and he presses the mute button on his phone while he tries to think. He's not had much experience of this beyond awesome Jackie Chan movies, but that had sounded a lot like someone being hit. Foggy stays very still, barely daring to breathe, before realising that a) he can just turn up the volume if he wants to hear better and b) he's just muted his phone, so if he continues to breathe, he will neither alert the people on the other end, nor pass out from oxygen deprivation.

The sound of another flurry of punches startles Foggy out of his thoughts. Although - no. This had sounded less like one continual chain of punches, and more like the back-and-forth of a Bruce Lee fight. But it ends with the sound of someone crashing to the floor and another low grunt of pain.

'Think, Foggy!' he urges himself. 'Options!' He could take his phone off mute, and yell out to see if it's Matt on the other end, and whether he's ok. But if Matt's not ok, Foggy will have given his eavesdropping presence away without being able to assist at all. He could just hang up, and go back to sleep, and pretend-- nah. Who is he kidding? That was never going to be an option. He could call the police, and have them track Matt's phone, so that professional trained people could deal with the situation. That definitely sounds like the most sensible option, except that Foggy is _using_ his phone and the closest pay phone is in the hall of the common room on the first floor.

Foggy pulls on pants that he can be seen in public in, and starts to pull on his shoes, phone wedged between his ear and shoulder. His heart is racing. Is Matt being mugged? Bullied? The leader of some kind of fight club?

But then he hears it - the sound of Matt crying out in pain, and the cry being cut off before it really begins. It makes Foggy's stomach clench.

'You've grown soft,' another voice says dismissively. 'Get up.'

Foggy can hear a soft scramble before Matt's voice says, surprisingly calmly, 'I'm done with you, Stick.'

Stick (what kind of name is Stick?) laughs in a not very nice way. 'But I'm not done with you, boy. This is what I get after all that time training you?'

Another muffled thump, followed by a couple of swishing 'thwack' noises. 

'Defend yourself!' Stick demands, and there's a beat of silence before the rhythm of a fight begins again. Foggy doesn't know anything about fighting, and he didn't think that Matt did, either. The thought makes him feel vaguely sick.

There's a crash and the sound of something hard skittering across the floor to collide with another solid surface. There's the sound of one person's panting breaths.

'Two years,' comes Sticks voice, sounding cruel and mocking to Foggy, made tinny as it is by distance from Matt's phone. (Foggy guesses it must have slid out of Matt's pocket, if Matt is wrestling around on the floor like the audio suggests. He guesses he must be on speed dial for Matt, if he's so easily pocket dialled. He's not sure how to feel about that sign of... trust? Camaraderie, at least.)

'I don't see you for two years, and you get yourself into _law school_ , and you're hanging out with prissy law students and you don't even notice me until I have you pinned like a worm on a hook?' Stick sounds like all these things are personal affronts, like going to law school isn't a thing you work your ass off to do, and hanging out with law students once you get there isn't just an obvious consequence of that.

'I'm done, Stick,' Matt says, but his voice is different now, muffled, like he's talking through a fat lip. 

'I'm. Not.' growls Stick, and there's a swish of movement and a full bodied thud that leaves Matt's breath coming fast and shallow. 

Foggy feels like he's drowning. Does he call the police? Is this the kind of trouble that you want the police involved in? God, what is Matt involved in? Foggy sits on his bed, frozen, one shoe on and the other dangling by its laces from his hand.

'Not...gonna fight...you,' Matt chokes out, around the tight, pained, breathing and the fat lip. 

'You don't have to hit me back,' Stick chuckles, and it's the least humourous sound Foggy's ever heard. 'Feel free to sit there and take it.'

There are another three sharp blows, and Foggy can't help but think of the documentaries that talk about people hitting lettuce to make the right sound effects for the fight scenes in the movies. He can feel his skin crawling at the idea of someone doing that to Matt. Another hit lands, and another. Matt makes another of those choked off grunting sounds of pain, and Stick chuckles again.

'I think that one might have broken something, Matty.'

'Are you going to kill me?' Matt just asks, sounding quite a lot weary and not at all terrified, which freaks Foggy out even more, somehow.

'I might just,' Stick says derisively. 'If you're not going to be any good to me.'

'Maybe I'll be your defence lawyer one day,' Matt says, considering, and is rewarded for this bit of sass with another 'thwack', which oh my god, is the sound of an actual stick and not just a weird, sadistic man named Stick.

'Get up,' snarls Stick. 'This is not the life I trained you for.'

Foggy can hear another scuffle - perhaps like Matt actually is trying to get up - but it's interrupted by another 'thwack' and another sharp blow of something hard against something that hurts.

'I can smell your blood,' Stick says with disgust, and ok, that is just a flat out creepy thing to say to someone. 'Get up!'

Something that sounds like scrabbling on the floor - a shuffle that sounds like Matt might be pushing himself up against something. Foggy can hear Matt panting, like now it takes a lot of effort to stand up. Foggy has leapt to his own feet in sympathy without realising it, and now he's standing with one shoe on and one shoe off, crazy amounts of useless adrenalin pumping through his veins.

'Get your hands up!' commands Stick, and Foggy doesn't know if Matt does, or doesn't, but nothing seems to stop the next volley of punches that are aimed at him. There's a hit with a particularly sickening sound to it, followed closely by another crash and the sound of something breaking. Even with the distance between Matt and his discarded phone; even through the crappy connection that the carrier provided, Foggy can hear the strained quality of those quick, desperate breaths.

'Not gonna fight you,' Matt says again, and even though his voice is slurred and thick, he sounds resolute. 'I'm done, Stick.'

Stick snarls at him, like an honest to god wolf might. The hair on Foggy's neck prickles just hearing it. 'If you can't even protect yourself, boy, how are you gonna protect that long haired kid you keep hanging out with?' And if the hair on Foggy's neck was prickling before, now even the hair on his arms is standing on end, one great big evolutionary 'Oh hell no' at the idea of this crazy Stick man not only knowing who he is, but knowing that he's a friend of Matt's.

But those words seemed to have triggered something in Matt, who responds with a wordless growl just as fierce as Stick's. 'You leave him out of this,' Matt says in a low, dangerous voice, like he hadn't been gasping for breath on the ground just moments earlier.

'What are you gonna do about it if I don't?' Stick taunts, and suddenly there's the sound of clashing so fast that Foggy has no hope of working out what's happening, only that probably Matt was holding back before, because holy crap, this fight sounds vicious and he even hears Stick give a couple of muffled grunts of pain. In the end, though, there's a tremendous crash, this time preceding the sound of a body slamming to the ground, and Matt's quiet moan makes Foggy's heart clench in terror, because what if that was the sound of his best friend being beaten to death?

Stick only laughs though, mocking but also with a certain kind of satisfaction. 'Well, well,' he says, sounding a little bit breathless but nothing at all like the pained breathing from Matt. 'You still got it in you, Matty. I'm glad to see that.'

Matt doesn't answer - maybe he can't answer - but Stick seems happy enough with that, because he says, 'Well, I'll be seeing you, boy,' and his deliberate footsteps move away from Matt and closer to his phone, until there's a pause, followed by a sharp _crunch_ , and the line goes dead.

'Matt!' yelps Foggy, cursing his own stupidity, because now he knows that Matt is somewhere, and hurt, but he doesn't know where and he doesn't know how to get in touch with him anymore. He shoves his foot into the shoe that he's neglected up to this point, grabs his coat, and hurtles out the door of their dorm, not having the faintest idea where he's going, but being absolutely certain that there's no way he can just sit there waiting.

The night air is crisp and unforgiving. Foggy's footsteps leave damp patches across the white frost on the lawns and footpaths. He has no idea where Matt is. He has no idea where Matt would go. It's four thirty on a freezing Sunday morning in November, and he's racing around campus like a crazy man, looking for his ninety three per cent amazing, seven per cent maybe actually insane roomie, like his life depended on it.

Foggy gives up at six thirty, still half an hour before the sun will properly rise. His face is numb and he can't feel his hands and it turns out he'd forgotten about the existence of socks when he rushed out the door, because his feet are not only blocks of ice, they're damp and squishy blocks of ice, which is a whole new level of uncomfortable.

He's going to head back to the dorm, and pick up his wallet - which he'd also forgotten, so he had nothing to call a cab with, only enough coins for a Three Musketeers bar he's going to _devour_ before taking a deep breath, and probably maybe calling the cops, because he's in way over his head here.

The dorm is dark and about as cold as the chilly morning outside. Foggy wearily flips on the light, and just about has a heart attack at what - who - he sees.

_'Matt!'_

Matt's face is a mess of bruises and dried blood. One eye is swollen shut, and there's even blood in his _hair_. He's sitting very still on the edge of his bed, like he's afraid that if he moves, he'll be drawing attention to himself. He still manages to give Foggy a crooked smile, made even more crooked by his split lip.

'Oh my god, you look like you've been run over,' Foggy blurts out, because he's tactful like that, but Matt just gives the tiniest of self-deprecating shrugs. 

'You should see the other guy,' he says, deadpan, and Foggy can't help his sharp, shocked, inhalation.

Matt stills instantly, any levity gone. 'Stick told me you'd... but I thought...'

'Matt, who _was_ that?' Foggy implores, terrified on Matt's behalf. He kneels very gingerly in front of Matt. 'I'm here, by the way. Don't freak out. I'm just down here, in front of you.'

Matt gives another tiny smile. 'Ok, Foggy. Thanks.'

'So... Stick?' Foggy prompts, eyes scanning Matt to make sure that he didn't seem on the verge of actual death or anything. Foggy's never had to do more first aid than pass across a box of band aids, so he's really not sure he's adding value here.

Matt sighs. 'He was my... boxing coach,' he says at last.

 _'Boxing coach?'_ squawks Foggy in disbelief. 

'Kind of,' Matt sighs again. 

'He really wanted you to be his star pupil and all you wanted was a career in the law?' Foggy says incredulously, because if that's not the most absurd thing he's ever heard, he isn't sure what is.

'Kind of,' Matt repeats, and he sounds so disheartened that Foggy abruptly realises that Matt is beaten and bloody and all he's doing is asking interview questions about Matt's boxing career. (Which. He totally needs the story behind that one. Just maybe not right this moment.)

'Ok,' Foggy says, 'first aid first, and everything else... later.' 

Matt quirks an eyebrow at him.

'You gonna patch me up?' he asks, amused again.

'No!' exclaims Foggy. 'I don't know. I can at least buy you band aids, I am very capable at buying things from the store. Wait. Do you have any life threatening injuries? Like the kind I should call 911 about right now so I don't make the front page of the local paper as the guy who just kept babbling while his best friend slowly died in front of him?'

Matt's smile changes to something more surprised, more delighted. 'Best friend?'

'Oh, shut up,' Foggy blurts, 'and yes, ok, but let's deal with that later and figure out whether you have an life threatening injuries first, ok?'

'Ok,' says Matt, still smiling. 'And no. Nothing life threatening. Nothing I can't handle.'

'Ok,' says Foggy. 'But I'm gonna take you down to the Urgent Care clinic so they can look you over, because believe me, you do not want me to be the most qualified medical person to examine you.'

Matt's smile fades. 'Foggy,' he says, quietly, helplessly. 'I've done... There are...'

'It's ok,' Foggy says, because it is. 'You fell down the stairs. Or some teens mugged you for your phone. I'm a good liar, that's why I'm doing so well at law school. The clinic will believe me. And I won't ask about Stick again. Not unless you want me to. I promise, Matt.'

And seeing a little of that tension drain out from Matt's shoulders is worth sacrificing his curiosity, Foggy supposes. Because that's Matt Murdock. Ninety three percent amazing, seven per cent weird as hell, and one hundred per cent stuck with Foggy now.


End file.
